50 years of tech devices
Ben's Bites Ben Tossell
Ben built a 50-year device museum in one morning. It uses AI-made images, scrubbing timelines, and shareable votes.
Based on reporting by Ben's Bites, Ben Tossell — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Ben Tossell turned a quick idea about forgotten devices into a site called bentossell.com/devices, and he says he got the first version done in a morning. It started in Codex, finished with Factory, and now shows 87 devices from 1976 to 2026 with images generated by Astra. He says the whole thing came out of a few message threads, a couple of rebuilds, and a lot of trying things before he knew what the final shape should be.
The original spark was a grid of old devices that looked like they had been pulled from memory and polished into something new. Then Ben saw a timeline scrubber demo and decided to combine the two ideas. So the site became less a gallery and more a time machine: drag across the years and the device changes under your cursor. He also pushed the dataset forward from the 2000s to the present, using subagents to find the real model, track down a reference photo, and generate an image of that exact device.
A lot of the work is about making the site feel oddly alive. Ben asks the agents for multiple versions, picks one, and keeps moving. He used one setup to build the main site, another to mount bentossell.com/devices on his domain, and another to make the voting page shareable without needing auth or a database. The votes are stored by here.now; the list of devices sits in one file; the images in another. Simple, almost aggressively so.
The rough edges were part of the story too. The first pass felt slow when images loaded, so he opened a Droid thread to fix that and asked for a preview before redeploying. Later he added a leaderboard for the most “had” and most “wanted,” then a video demo, then count handling after his own testing hit the read limit and exposed a wall at 25,000 votes. By the end, the thing had turned into a tidy demo of how far a few good agents can carry a weekend project.
And yes, the whole point was also to be a bit nostalgic. Ben wanted people to vote on what they had or wished they had, then get a page they could share. That’s a smart little loop: memory, comparison, bragging rights. Very internet, but with a timeline.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the good kind of AI project: small, playful, and actually shipped. The real flex isn’t “look what the model can do”; it’s that Ben used a pile of agents to make a weird idea feel finished instead of vaporware. That’s the standard now, whether people like it or not.
Read more about this at: Ben's Bites
